Video transcript

So let's continue our
discussion of emotions. If you remember from
the previous video, emotion is made up of a series
of cognitive, physiological, and behavioral
responses to a stimulus. But which response comes first? And this one of those topics
that I think a lot of us take for granted. It's something that
occurs in everyday life. But we generally
don't break it down and think of it in
these components and wonder, gee,
which one comes first? So thank goodness we
have psychologists who do that for us. And as you might imagine, this
is a pretty complicated topic. So there isn't just
one theory of emotion. There's many
theories of emotion. And for our
purposes, we're going to discuss four different
theories of emotion. The first one is called the
James-Lange theory of emotion. And it's named after
two researchers who both independently came up with
this theory back in the 1800s. So they actually weren't
working together. They just each came up with
it around the same time. So in the interest
of fairness, they decided to name it
after both of them. So that's why it's known as the
James-Lange theory of emotion. And what it hypothesizes is
that the experience of emotion is due to the perception of
your physiologic responses. So what does that mean? Well, let's think about an
example of maybe holding your pet. Let's say you have a pet cat. And holding your pet cat elicits
the emotion of happiness. So how does it do that? Well according to James-Lange
theory of emotion, holding your pet cat causes the
physiologic response of maybe increased heart rate. Certain neurotransmitters
change in your brain. Maybe you'll start to smile
as you're holding your cat. And what makes the James-Lange
theory of emotion unique is that they say it's
the interpretation of this physiologic
response that causes the emotion of happiness. So it's not actually
holding your cat per se that's making you happy. It's what the cat is
doing to your body that makes you feel the way you do. So it's your awareness of
these processes occurring that make you
realize you're happy. In another example, you could
say that when you're sad, you don't cry
because you're sad. You're sad because you cry. It's your mind's interpretation
of your physiological response. Now, you might be sitting there
finding that hard to believe. And if you feel
that way, it might interest you to know that there
are other theories of emotion as well that sprung up
because they didn't agree with this James-Lange approach. And one such theory is known
as the Cannon-Bard theory of emotion. And these were two
theorists who disagreed with the James-Lange theory. And they believed there were
some major flaws in the idea that physiologic responses
triggered emotion. So first they felt that
a person could experience physiological arousal without
feeling any particular emotion. So think about it. Your heart will race when
you're feeling afraid. But your heart also races
if you just had a long run. So how can that be? If the physiologic
response was all that was necessary to
produce an emotion, shouldn't any person with
a racing heart feel afraid? In that same line of
thought, these researchers also noticed that many
different emotions had the same patterns of
physiological response. So think about like your heart
racing or rapid breathing, those accompany feelings of
anger, as well as excitement. And those are two totally
different emotions. And lastly, they felt that the
physiological response system was just too slow to produce
emotions that often seemed to happen almost instantly. So for example, if
you hear a loud sound, maybe you'll feel fear or
surprise almost instantly. And subsequent physiologic
responses of your heart racing, increased muscle tone, et
cetera, they come later. And the theory they put forth
was the Cannon-Bard theory. And they believed that the
physiological responses and the experience of emotion
both occurred simultaneously. So you have an event
occurring, which causes a physiological
response, as well as an emotion at the same time. So going back to the example
of holding your cat, if you hold your cat, that's the event. And by holding your cat,
maybe your heart rate starts to increase
ever so slightly. Maybe there's some changes
going on in your brain in terms of your
neurotransmitters. And while that's
happening, at the same time you're feeling a feeling of joy. And that's the emotion
that you're experiencing. But the main point
here is this theory says these two actions
happen at the same time. Now, another key
theory of emotion is the Schachter-Singer
theory of emotion. And in this view, physiological
and cognitive responses may simultaneously form
the experience of emotion. More specifically, if we
become physiologically aroused, we don't feel a specific
emotion until we're able to label or identify
the reason for the situation. So in our previous example, we
spoke about holding your cat. So the event is
holding your cat, which produces a physiological
response of again maybe increased heart rate or changes
in your neurotransmitter levels. But we don't
necessarily feel happy until we consciously
label the situation. So you identify the reason
for this physiologic response. And you identify the
reason for the event. So you would say to yourself,
this is really nice. I like holding my cat. This makes me happy. And that's what produces
the emotion of happiness, this identification and
that cognitive ability to understand what's
going on that causes it. Now, another theory is
known as the Lazarus theory. And that proposed that
the experience of emotion depends on how the experience
is cognitively appraised. Now, you might think that sounds
very similar to the one we just discussed in the
Schachter-Singer theory. But it's different. And I'll show you why. So we have an event, let's
say again holding your cat. In the Lazarus theory, next
comes appraisal or labeling the situation. And what the
Lazarus theory says, if we label the
situation as bad, the emotion will be negative. And if we label the
situation as good, the emotion will be positive. So one of differences
here is that how we label the event is
completely dependent on personal experience
or cultural differences and situational factors. And once this
appraisal has occurred, then the emotion will
occur simultaneously with the physiological response. And as you can see, it is a
different order of things, as compared to the
Schachter-Singer theory. So using our example
holding a cat, if a person has held a
cat before and happened to be maybe bitten
by a cat or had a bad experience with
a cat, that individual may label the
situation as scary. And the emotion that
will be produced is fear. But on the other
hand, if someone is a cat lover, grown up
with cats their whole life, they might label that situation
of holding a cat as wonderful and feel joy. So it's all in the label. And the way I like
to think about this is in terms of hobbies. So take skydiving, for example. Some people would
label the activity of jumping out of a plane
as something terrifying. And they would experience
the emotion of fear. Whereas someone else
who's maybe a daredevil, they would label the
situation as exhilarating. And they would
experience happiness. But as you can see here, the
event of skydiving is the same. But it's producing two
very different emotions in different people, who
have different appraisals on the event occurring. So that's the four
theories of emotion that we're going
to discuss today.